Beyond Risør

In this project, we looked into how an organization in change can expand and take new directions. Our result is a visual organization design and an education programme developed for BeyondRisør.

BeyondRisør is a design organization located in Risør and recently became the

partner city with Danish non-profit organization, INDEX: Design to improve life. This puts BeyondRisør in a unique position to be the only design organization in Norway to promote design to improve life. Since BeyondRisør started up in 2005, they have arranged design biennials in their small town in the south of Norway. At their latest biennale, BeyondLight, things started to happen when the CEO of INDEX was one of the speakers.

We were asked to map possible directions the organization could take. The task itself was not clearly defined in the start and has evolved along with the project. The use of a systems oriented approach has been crucial to our design process and helped us to generate a holistic view and sort out the information in an understandable way. System oriented design is about understanding how systems thinking works and how to use it in design. During the semester, we have experienced how this way of thinking can seize un-defined problems and reveal solutions we didn’t know existed. We focused on developing a dynamic structure that can keep up with an always-changing situation.